Purelink have been described more than once as an "ambient boy band." (They themselves say "jam band.") It's not meant dismissively—the American trio purposefully mean to function as a band, even if their main instruments are laptops. Ambient might not quite cut it as a descriptor, though. The group's music crosses eras and scenes, touching on the late '90s clicks & cuts boom as well as the billowy ambient techno put out by labels like 3XL, West Mineral Ltd. and NAFF. 

Their most recent LP, Signs, released on enigmatic imprint Peak Oil (and one of our favourite albums of 2023), is especially impressive, made of stuttering rhythms and glassy textures. In other words, it's ambient-not-ambient. While members Concave Reflection, kindtree and Millia have all made excellent music on their own, something special happens when they come together.

Purelink's RA Podcast is another stellar contribution to our post-New Year's tradition, where we highlight a more laid-back sound to soothe weary minds and frazzled brain cells after the heavy holiday celebrations. This is 90-plus minutes of intricately textured downtempo, dub techno and even UK garage, all cut through with a floaty, almost drowsy quality, with plenty of exclusives and unreleased cuts from the likes of Nick León, James K, Downstairs J and more. It highlights Purelink's position as a bridger of worlds, sounds and tempos.

Read more at https://ra.co/podcast/917

RA podcast

RA.917 Purelink

Tracklist:
Lia T - Kester
pretty sneaky - B2
Digidub - Dark Breath
J-Green - Wavin' The 44
Azu Tiwaline - Amen Dub
pretty sneaky - A
Pugilist & Pod - Crisps
Mulholland - 442 Wenger
Terra Utopia - Likwid Mindz
Plebeian - Panic (Kincaid Remix)
Clemency - Testimony (Perko Remix)
Hooverian Blur - Hypnotizer
Autogenesis x cusoon dj x Simone Bauer - Chimera
Plebeian - Star Anise (Tammo Hesselink Remix)
Forest On Stasys - Natura Geometrica
Nicolò - Drydrums (Formant Value Remix)
Sha Ru - Iva
exael - Papillion
Dorothy Carlos - Balm
MinaeMinae - orientieren

james K - Trip Lick - NTS April 2025

Florence takes the reigns - real style eclectic shit as ever, chin strokers take note: an hour of wall to wall proper material ㋡ 

@florencesa


Jank Incorporated | Florence 042

Artist, producer, label owner and DJ Lee Gamble bringing an oneiric bi-monthly show of current sound and music from his hallucinated musical continuum. Expect anything from Drill to Dream pop, Conceptual Sound and Jazz to bleached out rave memories..  
Find the full tracklist and related episodes on NTS: https://www.nts.live/shows/lee-gamble/episodes/lee-gamble-7th-july-2025

Lee Gamble 070725

Dub influences for July

Tracklist: https://www.lowendtheorists.com/radio-shows/skylab-e37

Skylab - Theory Therapy E37

tracklist available on IG @ inner__smile__

025 Tiffany: Blue Hour

Chrysalis co parents Amylia and DJ papaya invite Yaka to collaborate in a playful and expensive b3b to open a very special renegade edition of everyone's favorite party series.

Chrysalis b3b

Living Room n°88 ~ @user-195275547

q. pls introduce yourself…
Hello, we are forest.exe (Sven and Silvan). We run a label that focuses on ambient, avant-garde and experimental music. It is called Jurassic Ambient Records. The name is inspired by the Jura forests in Switzerland, where we live and grew up. We create our own mixes and also release guest mixes as well as music from friends and anyone interested. We started about four years ago. Over time, we gradually moved away from technoid sounds and club culture, and began experimenting and mixing together within the genres of ambient, experimental and drone, where we felt more at home. For us, it is essential to connect music with the wellbeing in nature, which is also the origin of everything.

q. is there a story behind the mix?
This time we created the mix with Ableton in Sven’s home studio, nestled near the Jurassic forest — not, as we usually do, in a rehearsal room with a Pioneer setup. It was a warm and luminous day at the very beginning of summer. Surrounded by nature, we let the atmosphere guide us, working spontaneously and intuitively. Instead of CDJs, we wanted to explore a new approach, giving ourselves more time and space to shape the flow. This allowed us to engage more deeply with each track and to sculpt the transitions with greater precision.
The result is a mix that feels reduced and calming, almost dreamlike, yet still carries a quiet strength. It mirrors the uncertainties and concerns we feel about the world, and the question of how we might navigate through them. We dedicated an entire day to the process, with pauses, a few beers, and long conversations about the value of music and the character we wanted this mix to embody.

q. what’s the best way to enjoy your mix?
Step into the forest, put on your headphones, leave the world behind and sink into natural, calming sounds. You might wander along the paths and lose yourself in the embrace of nature, or sit quietly on a tree stump, listening to the mix while observing the subtle life unfolding around you. This is, in essence, what our name forest.exe is meant to evoke.

q. describe a favourite object in your living room...
Silvan: My favourite object in my living room is a handmade ceramic piece with an organic, natural design. I discovered it in Krakow last year during my visit to the Unsound Festival.
Sven: Hehe… epic indeed. My favorite object in my living room is a triptych of three Japanese woodblock prints. In the first, several farmers brandishing katanas burst forth with fierce cries. In the second, a lone farmer leaps dramatically over a waterfall, sword in hand. And in the third, a bear flees from the oncoming attackers. The imagery is raw and powerful, yet strangely inspiring. I don’t know the artist or when the pieces were created — but stumbling upon them in an antique shop felt like a stroke of fortune, as if they had been waiting there for me.

q. are you working on any projects right now (music or not music)?
We are both working on new music, though it often takes a lot of time — which can be challenging, since we both work more or less full-time as social workers, and Sven also has children. Still, we meet regularly to create ambient mixes, discuss musical developments, and continue shaping our vision for the label. Through it, we keep releasing new mixes as well as music (EPs) from ourselves and from other artists.
What we love is that this project has been with us for quite some time, and we can move at our own pace — deciding how much energy to put in, or when to slow things down. That way, it never becomes stressful, because we are not chasing success, but rather sharing our musical principles and offering others a fresh listening experience. We are also searching for a spot in the forest where we can record outdoor mixes, letting nature inspire our music even more directly.

Living Room n°88 ~ forest.exe

https://erfrecordings.bandcamp.com/album/burn-perf000

Burn is the second YS album and written as a direct follow-up album to Brutal Flowers. If their first album was an exercise in the incremental, a construction of poise and patience, Burn, should be taken way the fuck at it’s word: it quite literally finds catharsis in twisted reverse. Birthed out the malignant kick found in deconstruction and chaos. Evil twin, psychotic younger sibling, call it what the hell you like. It might take you a moment to get the lay of the land in this darkly mutated world. Like a bug eye’d native first confronted with a zippo, the hit is radical and instant: a new way for the world to go up in smoke.

Splice the Seattle slacker scene with the spliffhead soundsystem culture of the '90s Bristol trip-hop scene, then cross-breed that with the DIY optimism and glee in creation found in the cut-and-paste worlds of skate, graffiti and hiphop, now run that through the skitzo basement mind of John.T. Gast and you’re close to the kind of scorched earth and spiked suburbia that birthed Burn.

Dunno quite what YS have been ingesting of late, but this massively twisted LP touches on a host of gloriously fucked totemic underground sources while not sounding much like any of them. It has the ballsy swagger and hard flipping of the script as Massive Attack’s seminal Blue Lines. Indeed, the eponymous album tracks sound similar - the opener ‘Burn’ is like a hard-nosed, jammed-out redux of ‘Blue Lines’. Getting into a kind of slow-spinning overdubbed maximal euphoria ending with mumbled downer vocals, struggling to conceal their tongues in their cheeks, there’s an air of paranoia and proto-conspiracy theory. It’ll leave you scratching your head, feeling like you’ve stepped into a New World Order governed by a cacophony of dropouts, dope fiends, and apocalyptic stoners. A cracked-out world somewhere between Richard Linklater’s movie Slacker (1990) and Marc Singer’s Dark Days (2001).

The rest of the album parts like a tongue on a wine glass: Smith and Mighty, Bandulu, ambient Luke Slater records, Wah Wah Wino, Nurse with Wound, Land of the Loops, Placid Angels, Adrian Sherwood, Urban Tribe and DJ Shadow can all be heard in momentary splatters - but Burn like other works by YS, is its own ritual beast. ‘Moth’, a track that has been circulating the underground DJ circuit for many moons, is a raw, chopped, and screwed slice of stoner erotica that reeks of obsession and unrequited desire. Elsewhere, on tracks like ‘Switch’, ‘Trying’, and ‘Drift’, the throughline from Brutal Flowers can be heard. Underneath the driving heavy gravity, the trademark emotional intimacies of YS linger: eternal recurrence, ghosts of static and shortwave, worn memories of the playful and painful sort. The brief moments when flashes of orchestral ambience emerge from beneath the swagger are so pure, personal, and unguarded that, for a moment, they leave you completely alone. In the album’s closer ‘End’, you can hear the fleeting promise and DIY possibilities of an analogue world and embers of ash that flutter in its wake: where it seemed, for a brief moment, that collective of DJs, engineers, rappers, graffiti artists and skate crews were emerging from the streets, giving the middle fingers to the system, before just as quickly disappearing back to the doldrums of obscurity. ‘End’ is a bittersweet ode to early soundsystem culture, MCs and pirate radio - an out of step time where for a moment the underdogs and weirdos seemed to be kicking on the door of something bigger.

A veritable teenage doof suite dosed with desire, claustrophobia, and deviance. Burn is a good old howl at the moon: lonely, raw, and out for blood; basement style exegesis at its best. A thump to the gut, a stud through your blood. A dubbed-to-death classic straight out of the annals of nowhere. A perfect postcard from oblivion. A bleak, bold, and personally ferocious vision of tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

PREMIERE | YS - Moth [PERF000]

Living Room n°90 ~ @ghosttropics

~

q. pls introduce yourself:

a. Hi! I’m Ryan aka ghosttropics and I think most people on here know me as “that person who is in the comment boxes of all the ambient releases on bandcamp”. Mostly I’m just a huge music nerd/listener/dancer, but I try to write about the music that care about as much as I can as a way to engage with the community a bit more and to give back to the artists who bless me with the music that brings so much to my life. Which is how you guys found me! This is only the second mix I ever made and I’ve since worked on a couple more, and it’s becoming this very fulfilling new thing in my life that I look forward to exploring a bit more.

q. is there a story behind the mix?

a. First of all I just wanted to thank you guys for having me here and giving me this opporunity to work on this mix, which ended up being very meaningful and downright therapeutic for me to make. It is dedicated to my late best friend Blakely, and also to anyone who lives with that soul deep and unnameable feeling of missing someone, but also feeling them with you all the time. At the very centre of the mix (both figuratively and at the literal halfway point) is a track of Blakes that I hadn’t been able to bring myself to listen to for years. I always thought it was one of the most beautiful things I ever heard and just the purest audio distillation of everything I loved about my friend, and as soon as the mix started to come together I knew it was the right time to bring it back into my life. Everything from there just seemed to come together on is own as if guided by a gentle hand.

The feeling I tried to capture in this mix is not simply sadness because grief is SO much more than that. It’s about how that sadness can also be so deeply intertwined with a feeling of indescribable gratitude and joy in having known a person, and it’s about all the beautiful and unexpected ways we can keep them with us throughout our lives. To me, this mix is exactly that. A way to share the story of my friend with the world and feel closer to him, and I hope that listening to this can give others the space to remember and relate to their own experiences in a way that feels meaningful as well.

q. what’s the best way to enjoy your mix?

a. As is my answer to most things: lying down, eyes closed, cuddling a cute dog. But really, wherever works best for you! 

q. describe a favourite object in your living room...

a. I found the most beautiful/perfect antique rocking chair with a rocking footrest on the sidewalk a couple months ago and I swear I could not even conceptualize a better reading chair. I refused to buy one for years because I wanted it to be perfect (I read nearly as much as I listen to music) and part of me feels like I willed this thing into reality. 

q. are you working on any projects right now (music or not music)?

a. I’m thinking about maybe starting some sort of newsletter as my friends keep telling me to do, but for now I’m just gonna keep writing my little bandcamp reviews and making more mixes, cause that’s what’s feeling good right now. And despite my past promise to myself to never become a DJ (half joking) maybe buy a controller and start figuring out how to do some of this stuff live at some point!

Secret nap

Mi Yá

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